The Red Wheelbarrow 10, with the work of more than 50 writers, is launching at GainVille Café on Friday, Sept. 29! We will have an open reading from poets in the anthology, and since it is our 10th anniversary issue, you do not want to miss it! We’ll start things off with musical guest THE ELECTRIC POET GATHERING featuring George Pereny.

wears an elegant outfit,
decolletage, with a thigh-high split.
I’m almost 17, making a delivery
during the war for a local drug store.
She pays me with a big fat tip,
invites me in for a yummy taste
of blueberry pie she’s just baked.
She tells me her back is in pain—
do I have time to give her a back rub?
Her stereo is ablaze with the vibrato
of Edith Piaf while she offers me
a sip of homemade wine, brewed
by her husband before he left.
I sit on her sofa and wonder:
Is this a fantasy I’ve had on my delivery route?
Are we both phantoms in a mutual dream?
We both seem to savor the mystery
of the perfect moment—no dialogue necessary.
My body and soul is willing
in more ways then I care to say.
It’s the very best blueberry pie
I’ve ever tasted, before or since.

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and founding member of Calypso Editions. He spent 2009-10 as a Fulbright Fellow in Romania. Martin’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Kenyon Review, Asymptote, Guernica, The Cimarron Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poetry International. Martin’s published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, and a full-length collection of poems, This River Goes Two Ways. He edited Of Gentle Wolves, an anthology of Romanian poetry, worked with MARGENTO to translate Gellu Naum’s poetry for the English language collection, Athanor & Other Pohems, and contributed to Ruxandra Cesereanu’s anthology of contemporary Romanian Erotic Poetry, Moods & Women & Men & Once Again Moods. For more, visit martinwoodside.com.

One month into the marriage,
they were penniless in Music City, where,
with such wealth in his hands and throat,
the marital mattress should have been stuffed with bills,
the larder shelves laden with more than one can,
and he himself cream risen to the top.

He should have had piles of chips,
but he’d been a big deal in a small game
and, what with his delicate temperament,
would only wait,
guitar in hand and drink on the table,
for others to discover his worth.

So he slept and practiced all day,
drank and gigged all night,
when he gigged.

She was a poet,
but found a secretary gig on Music Row,
typed all day, lines not her own,
and still wrote after work.

He never washed one dish,
made one bed,
rinsed out one tub.

He spent her grandpa’s silver dollar
on a quart of beer and a pack of Pall Malls.

He proudly stood by a friend, kicked out by his wife,
gave him pieces of their cheap but complete
silverware set, her mother’s pitiful wedding gift
that she could ill afford.
He disregarded the miscellaneous silver
in the same drawer
that she used in her first apartment
before she married him with all the expectations of art.

He wrote her a song without lyrics,
a melody that echoed her name.
One afternoon, he turned to her mother.
“I wrote a song for you,” he smiled,
and played her name.

He, who had nothing to spend,
was spendthrift with her.
He, who had nothing to give,
gave her away.
He, who had nothing to lose save his pride,
could not save a silver dollar’s worth of marriage.

The day she walked out,
she was wearing the green dress
she had made for their wedding.